Allianz Intranet

The Allianz intranet home page

The Allianz intranet home page

Our client, Allianz, has just had its intranet featured in Jacob Nielsen's 2006 report, Ten Best Intranets of the Year.

Key results

The previous site was three years old, and reflected a highly siloed approach focussed on the separate requirements for each different department within the organisation.

The intranet was viewed as a handy place to store information, but the content was skimpy in many areas, and in others simply stored long technical manuals as Word or Pdf documents. Allianz wanted the redesign to help employees do their jobs more efficiently, and respond to future growth and changing company strategy.

The Hiser Group’s work on the project helped Allianz to achieve the following results:

  • page views have increased in the 12 months since launch. This comes after an initial drop due to the number of pages viewed to reach a particular piece of content being halved
  • subjective satisfaction rates are high, with users reporting “the site is easy to navigate”
  • the site is now seen as a business critical tool and is used daily by Allianz staff.

Major changes

  • “Quickstart” feature provides fast access to each employee’s most-used pages, no matter where these happen to be in the site. It contains a set of links to each department’s most-used content; business units’ content owners set default links. In addition, employees can customise it to their requirements if they wish.
  • new design reduces the depth of the menu structure. On the previous intranet, some content was six or seven clicks deep. The new information architecture places information three, or at most four, levels down.
  • navigation structure no longer department based but task-based, making information easier to find and reducing duplication.
  • home page now a highly visible, reliable source of company-wide news, with the entire left column devoted to internal campaigns and promotions, and the top half of the centre column covering news items
  • contact directory much more detailed, including employees’ reporting lines and staff members, and an alternative who can handle calls when the person is absent
  • better organised content for call centre staff

Collaborative team

Allianz had some expertise and available resourcing internally. They put together a team, including several employees, visual designers from webqem, and an interface designer fromThe Hiser Group. We came in at various strategic points to do specific tasks, with much of the project work resting with the internal team.

Allianz conducted workplace studies with users, watching how they completed predetermined tasks. They conducted field studies with 100 employees from all over the organisation, sitting with them and watching how they used the intranet to do their jobs.

Hiser interviewed key internal stakeholders to uncover their business needs and goals. To get the redesign moving quickly, Hiser facilitated a three-day design workshop with:

  • the Allianz intranet team
  • IT
  • a business representative from Allianz’s Contact Center, the company’s largest user community
  • two visual designers from Webqem.

In the workshop the group refined and prioritised the goals falling out of the earlier research. Then each team member worked on aspects of the intranet’s design, to meet these goals. The key focus of the redesign was to provide a task-focused structure that is intuitive and easy to learn, making information and tools quick to find.

Every few hours people presented their designs to each other, selecting the best design elements and then refining the design. At the end of workshop, there were two wireframe designs to test with users

Hiser also created an initial draft of the information architecture, then presented these to the team in the form of a large card sorting exercise. (Team members sorted cards representing each group of information into categories to help build a more intuitive menu structure).

Testing with paper mockups

Using paper prototypes, the Allianz team conducted usability tests with 20 users. They were asked to perform a number of tasks, such as:

  • finding a phone number
  • starting an approved online training course
  • finding the latest company news
    determining which employee benefits they could use for Christmas
  • ordering photocopy paper.

Further refinements were made to the design and the information architecture in light of these results, with Hiser and Allianz working together to create the most appropriate result.

Webqem then applied a visual design to the wireframe in line with Allianz’s corporate branding.

Hiser then delivered an in-house training course on effective writing for the web to internal authors.

Positive response

Once the new intranet launched, the response was very positive. One Allianz business development manager called the new intranet “wonderful,” and said: “it’s a lot easier to find what you are looking for, and see what’s available to you.”